Thursday, 30 April 2009

One of the stranger items on my bookshelves is a little 48-page duodecimo volume, bound in red cloth and dating (at a guess) from the 1920s, called My Duties As My Own Librarian, by Arthur H. Jenn and Edward P. Gray. Subtitled For Book Lovers, Booksellers and Librarians, it features on the cover a line engraving of an elegantly dressed, notably humourless chap in wing collar and bow tie, standing at a desk strewn with books and papers, which he is firmly bringing to order. The first section of the book, My Library And I by Edward P. Gray, contains this stern but true dictum, 'The problem of putting in order and, what is of the utmost importance, keeping in order, your stock of books so that any volume required can be found easily and at a glance is not so easy of solution as you may think.' Tell me about it... Inspired by the 'methodical, neat and easy way the ordinary public library staff appear to do their work', the author sets about organising his library into its various subjects - Religion, Philosophy, Fiction, Art, History, Mucky Books (OK I made that one up), etc, and assigning to each subject area a letter. You see where this is going? Next thing you know, our man is busy arranging works within these categories alphabetically by author's name, and then - yes - listing them all ('this I found intensely interesting') on index cards, once again on a classified system, arranged alphabetically by subject, and within subjects alphabetically by author. Next he sets off in quest of a well lit room to house his library. It must have large windows, in which 'for all practical purposes clear glass is most assuredly the best'- he thinks of everything. Equipped with plenty of adjustable shelving, he sets to work - but what to do with quarto and folio volumes? Why, our man creates a 'parallel library' of large books, leaving book-sized blocks on the main shelves to indicate where to find the relevant quarto or folio. Ingenious no? With some remarks on the care of books - 'I invariably keep a calico duster handy and give the covers of the books a light rub over before replacing them' - the use of the bookmark and the repair of loose and torn leaves, Mr Gray retires from the scene, and Mr Jenn interjects a short chapter on cataloguing and classification, before one 'J.P.' provides the concluding section, Myself As A Bookseller. 'It does not look well for an assistant at any bookseller's,' writes JP, 'not to know a little about a book that may be asked for. It sounds the doom of that bookseller where the assistant confesses in his own splenetic fashion that he "doesn't know".' Aah those different times... Then there's the vexed matter of top shelves. 'I am not antagonistic to top shelves for the keeping of books, but I used to regard them as something that made my blood run cold.' Well, quite. It seems JP still has issues, as we soon learn that 'lately I have had my top shelves taken down, the walls thereabouts repapered, and I have in consequence improved the position of the shop'. I'm not sure I understand that, but he seems pleased with his bold move. With some concluding remarks on assistants - 'I tell my assistants that they are my representatives, and that what they say, and what they recommend, is precisely as though I myself were standing in their shoes' - JP takes his leave and this curious little book ends. I trust this has awakened your inner librarian and you are all reaching for your index cards and your calico dusters, and eyeing those top shelves with icy distaste.

There could be an upside to this swine flu business. It might finally persuade people that the ill-mannered habit of coughing and sneezing in other people's faces is also a health risk. It is of course hideously widespread in London, where the use of tissues (or even handkerchiefs, remember them?) seems to have all but died out, and those not actively engaged in coughing, sneezing, hawking, spitting, digital emunction (a phrase I picked up from Beckett) and voiding their nostrils without benefit of tissue or cloth will like as not be sniffing loudly and persistently. Surely our Gordon - the man who enjoined us a while back to clear our plates when eating - can see the chance for another wartime-style, Britain-can-take-it publicity campaign - but somehow I suspect the poor fellow is rapidly losing the will to live...

Wednesday, 29 April 2009

I only ask because I caught 'The 10' (as they portentously call in in BBC circles) and there was the Welsh dunce - a man barely capable of reading an autocue convincingly - out in Basra doing John Simpson's job, despite the fact that The Man Himself was there, reduced to a brief interjection. If the BBC carries on like this, flying dud anchor men out to the four corners of the Earth at the drop of a hat - at vast expense and to no purpose - it is only accelerating its (by and large) richly deserved demise.

Talking of Auschwitz, there's a story about Walter Matthau. He was staying with his wife in a hotel which he discovered was quite close to Auschwitz, so he asked the manager to fix them a car and driver so they could pay a visit. 'Certainly Mr Matthau, no problem, etc etc, you go up to your room and I'll fix it.' Half an hour later, Walter and wife still in room, no sign of car. He phones down. 'Ah Mr Matthau I'm getting you a very special car, we can't have a star like you driving there in the village taxi', etc. OK. Another half hour passes. Same conversation. He's found a car and it's being valeted, won't be long, any minute now etc. Matthau getting very annoyed. Another half hour and Matthau's pacing the room, fuming. At last the call comes. 'Mr Matthau, I've got just the car for you - and it's outside the door right now.' 'OK I'll take it', Matthau barks down the phone, 'but I want you to know - you've ruined Auschwitz for me!'

Gordon Brown has seized the opportunity of a visit to Auschwitz to vow to battle 'darkness in the world'. As he seems to be well on his way to the Napoleon Suite at the Funny Hilton, he'd be well advised to study the pioneering anti-darkness work of the great De Selby in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - as discussed here. Conquering darkness could also have the beneficial effect of ending the affliction known as sleep, thereby liberating Brown's grateful subjects to toil away 24 hours a day generating tax revenues. Oh yes the Battle Against Darkness should be up there alongside the great battle against global warming. Onward citizens to a glorious future, liberated at last from the twin plagues of sleep and black air!

Gordon Brown has seized the opportunity of a visit to Auschwitz to vow to battle 'darkness in the world'. As he seems to be well on his way to the Napoleon Suite at the Funny Hilton, he'd be well advised to study the pioneering anti-darkness work of the great De Selby in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - as discussed here. Conquering darkness could also have the beneficial effect of ending the affliction known as sleep, thereby liberating Brown's grateful subjects to toil away 24 hours a day generating tax revenues. Oh yes the Battle Against Darkness should be up there alongside the great battle against global warming. Onward citizens to a glorious future, liberated at last from the twin plagues of sleep and black air!

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

A heartening report on the radio last night about the successful reintroduction of Latin into schools, via [Lat.] the Cambridge Schools Classics Project, which does this kind of thing, making Latin accessible to all. As one of the contributors pointed out, Latin acts as a ladder to higher ways of thinking and higher forms of discourse (hence the centuries-enduring Gradus ad Parnassum). It certainly leads to clearer thinking, especially about the structure of language and therefore meaning, and, happily, half-opens the door to a range of other modern languages - imagine how infinitely harder it would be to learn Italian with no knowledge of Latin. I think, historically, the learning of Latin has also been a ladder whereby children of lowly origin can, in every sense, 'get on' - that is why the teaching of Latin was central to the grammar school curriculum. And that is why, my friends, we have Shakespeare.

Monday, 27 April 2009

Reading Brit's response to Non-Obvious Appleyard on torture, I retreat before the complexities of the issue (into a generalised sense that it's probably dangerous to propose a total principled all-circumstances ban on just about anything, and that the British pragmatic bottom-up cumulative approach is preferable to almost anything derived from 'first principles'. By the way, it's Herbert Spencer's birthday today, but I have also retreated from the daunting prospect of writing anything about that strange lost colossus - though I did check out Herbert Spencer quotes online and some of them are surprisingly pithy and insightful - have a look. Maybe he's due a revival. God knows I'm not the man to start it - philosophy is definitely not my thing.) Which brings me to where I intended to start, with Brit's account of boxing up his philosophical Back Pages are realising how little connection he has with the person who read those books. Little remains but a vague memory of having once read them. I think we're all likely to feel this at such times, especially if we hang on to the books of our student years. And if there are comments in the margins... Aiee who was that person? What on earth did he mean by that? Being a good deal older than Brit, I think I've weeded out most of my student books, but I still have some that I know survive as essentially 'props' or totems, rather than reading matter. It is, I like to think, the sign of true education (rather than increasing feebleness of mind) that one can end up so far adrift from an earlier reading self. There is nothing sadder or, in any real sense of the word, less educated than the person whose library consists almost entirely of what they read in their student days. This is a sure sign of someone who has not moved on, whose education ceased with their graduation. True education is more likely to consist, as Brit says, in the stripping away of everything that once seeemed obvious, in the realisation that the more we know the more there is that we don't know. E sempre si fa il mar maggiore... Or, as John Sebastian puts it, 'but the more I see, the more I see there is to see'. This is a process that is hugely expanded and accelerated when we are active on the web and in particular in the blogscape, where worlds of instant connection are constantly opening up vast possibilities, vast areas of knowledge and its handmaiden ignorance. For myself I feel that my true education began all over again once I began to navigate those vast virtual waters, and still more so when I became a part of the blogscape, connected so profitably to the likes of Frank Wilson, Patrick Kurp, D.G. Myers, the indefatigable Yard of course - and Brit.

Sunday, 26 April 2009

'We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them.' Sir Michael Caine, telling it like it is. The British 'welfare state' has turned into a national disaster, perpetuating poverty, idleness and dependence - at huge and ever-growing expense. It's a model that could only work in a nation with a strong, homogeneous identity and sense of common cause, and a strong work ethic. None of which apply to modern Britain. See also De Tocqueville's Memoir on Pauperism, and Corelli Barnett's The Audit of War.

Friday, 24 April 2009

The horse chestnut trees are now in full flower in London and the suburbs - the grand specimens pictured above are part of the spectacular horse chestnut avenues of Bushey Park, adjacent to the better-known Hampton Court. The horse chestnut is perhaps the most extravagantly beautiful of our trees in spring, when the early, tender green parasols of leaflets are followed in short order by the dense 'candles' of flower spikes. The early show is all the more to be relished now that the trees are under attack from disease and from leaf miners, causing premature leaf fall, rusting, and even, in places, a failure of the conker crop that is so much a part of the British autumn. The more reason to enjoy these fine trees at their best - and now's the time, as the Slow London campaign gets under way... Oddly, the horse chestnut hasn't been a great favourite with painters - with the glorious exception of Samuel Palmer, who time and again captured its beauty, its geometry and its abundant spirit.

Thursday, 23 April 2009

Londoners, by Maurice Gorham, published in 1951, with beautiful illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, is a charming, if sketchy, portrait of the life of the city as it was in what now seems a historically remote past, so many changes have there been. Reading the chapter on 'Buying Books' ('Shopping for books is known to differ from any other kind of shopping. For one thing, it brings out the shopper in men...' That's still true) is to realise how much less of a presence the book trade is in today's London. Back in 1951, the trade encompassed 'every gradation from the rare books at Sotheby's to the tattered fragments on the twopenny stalls, from the smooth volumes of Wigmore Street to the wild miscellany of the railway bookstalls [railway bookstalls!], from the dubious goods of Praed Street to the eclectic erudition of Foyle's [!]'. Bumpus's, purveyor of gilded and tooled volumes to the gentry, still stood on Oxford Street, and the giant, genteel Times Book Club on Wigmore Street. At the other end of the trade, Gorham notes the recent arrival of 'American sex shockers' with titles such as 'Blondes Die Dumb'. 'Their lurid jackets,' he writes, 'have brightened those dubious bookshops in Praed Streeet whose stock used to consist of a dingy selection of Balzac [!], books on flagellation, the complete works of Aristotle (what a fate for the Stagyrite!) and Marie Stopes.' Yes, the 'complete works of Aristotle' - but nothing to do with the Stagyrite. The work in question, which came in various shapes and forms, often under the name of Aristotle's 'Masterpiece', was a remarkably long-lived clandestine publication that served as a manual (often lurid and wildly misleading) of sex instruction, childbirth and midwifery. There's a short account of it here, with references to the 'Masterpiece' made by rather more distinguished authors. Inevitably, it gets a mention in Ulysses - is there anything that doesn't, somewhere in that most compendious, all-encompassing fiction? I picked up a copy of 'Aristotle's Complete Masterpiece' myself years ago, but it must have disappeared in one of my library clear-outs - a pity; it's a fascinating specimen of the kind of unofficial literature that throws unaccustomed light on the past. The past beyond even Gorham's distant, long-lost London.

Wednesday, 22 April 2009

The search is on, over at D.G. Myers' place, for great last lines of novels. Naturally Lolita comes to mind - 'I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.' And then, still thinking of aurochs, I find this story. I shall cherish that headline...

I'm getting very tired of Antony Gormley and this Trafalgar Square plinth business. Here he is, unveiling 'a model of his latest work', which appears to be the vacant plinth with added safety netting to catch people who are moved to throw themselves off it. The idea of letting anyone who wants to (and whose application is successful) stand for an hour on the plinth is, Gormley was saying on TV last night, an expression of the great British tradition of 'open democracy'. Really? What's democratic about raising yourself up on a plinth? I fear it's going to be an all too vivid expression of a more recent British tradition - that of open exhibitionism. Why am I on this plinth? Because I'm worth it - and now I'm up here I'm going to... Argh the mind boggles. Leave the damned thing eloquently vacant.

Here's a map that graphically demonstrates two things: how little 'wilderness' (by this definition, anywhere more than 48 hours, with good connections and a following wind, from a major city)there is, and how little space we humans take up. Nearly all of us occupy just 10 per cent of the Earth's surface (the same percentage figure as 'wilderness'). Both these facts, I think, put us in our place - great world shrinkers, but not great spreaders. The latter fact surely gives room to hope that our impact on the planet might not be as catastrophic as many fear; we humans are always, I suspect, inclined to overestimate our importance in the larger scheme of things (and town dwellers, in particular, to forget how sparsely populated much even of this overcrowded island is). And meanwhile, across that shrinking world flies my beloved daughter, heading home after nine months in New Zealand. There will be rejoicing at Nige Towers tonight.

Tuesday, 21 April 2009

On this day in 1866, Jane Welsh Carlyle was found dead in her carriage in Hyde Park - a surprisingly quick and unfussy end for one whose life had been one long-drawn-out epic of mysterious ill health. Jane was one of the great Victorian Valetudinarians - a crowded field, in which she had stiff competition from her husband, a life-long martyr to troubles mostly digestive, details of which he shared with his beloved from early on in their courtship. The Carlyles were also one of the great Victorian Unhappy Marriages. V.S. Pritchett links them with the Tolstoys and the Lawrences as 'the professionals of marriage; they knew they were not in it for their good or happiness, that the relationship was an appointed ordeal, an obsession undertaken by dedicated heavyweights.' The Carlyles' house in Chelsea, though in the hands of the National Trust, still retains a potent neurotic gloom, an atmosphere of boiled mutton, acrimony and sickrooms. And yet, as her letters - one of the great Victorian collections - attest, Jane Welsh Carlyle had a lively, sparkling intellect and wit, as well as the formidable mental and emotional resources needed to support the brooding intellectual colossus (and, for much of their married years, failed writer) she was married to. Her letters might even outlast her husband's writings - they are certainly an easier read - and, happily, she will always be remembered for a frisky moment celebrated by Leigh Hunt in the much anthologised poem, Jenny Kissed Me:

'Jenny kiss'd me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in!Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kiss'd me.'

Monday, 20 April 2009

Reading Brit's response to Non-Obvious Appleyard on torture, I retreat before the complexities of the issue (into a generalised sense that it's probably dangerous to propose a total principled all-circumstances ban on just about anything, and that the British pragmatic bottom-up cumulative approach is preferable to almost anything derived from 'first principles'. By the way, it's Herbert Spencer's birthday today, but I have also retreated from the daunting prospect of writing anything about that strange lost colossus - though I did check out Herbert Spencer quotes online and some of them are surprisingly pithy and insightful - have a look. Maybe he's due a revival. God knows I'm not the man to start it - philosophy is definitely not my thing.) Which brings me to where I intended to start, with Brit's account of boxing up his philosophical Back Pages are realising how little connection he has with the person who read those books. Little remains but a vague memory of having once read them. I think we're all likely to feel this at such times, especially if we hang on to the books of our student years. And if there are comments in the margins... Aiee who was that person? What on earth did he mean by that? Being a good deal older than Brit, I think I've weeded out most of my student books, but I still have some that I know survive as essentially 'props' or totems, rather than reading matter. It is, I like to think, the sign of true education (rather than increasing feebleness of mind) that one can end up so far adrift from an earlier reading self. There is nothing sadder or, in any real sense of the word, less educated than the person whose library consists almost entirely of what they read in their student days. This is a sure sign of someone who has not moved on, whose education ceased with their graduation. True education is more likely to consist, as Brit says, in the stripping away of everything that once seeemed obvious, in the realisation that the more we know the more there is that we don't know. E sempre si fa il mar maggiore... Or, as John Sebastian puts it, 'but the more I see, the more I see there is to see'. This is a process that is hugely expanded and accelerated when we are active on the web and in particular in the blogscape, where worlds of instant connection are constantly opening up vast possibilities, vast areas of knowledge and its handmaiden ignorance. For myslef I feel that my true education began all over again once I began to navigate those vast virtual waters, and still more so when I became a part of the blogscape, connected so profitably to the likes of Frank Wilson, Patrick Kurp, D.G. Myers, the indefatigable Yard of course - and Brit.

I've been spending the day walking and enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, restoring my spirits ahead of my return to the bosom of NigeCorp tomorrow. The orange tips are flying (that's one on its food plant, Jack by the Hedge, which tastes like garlic). Mind strangely blank, but this passage from Geoffrey Hill has been bombinating around in my head, so I'll pass it on. It seems somehow topical:

'Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,it is for me increasingly a terrainseen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,conglomerate, metamorphic rock-strata, in which particular grace,individual love, decency, enduranceare traceable across the faults.

Admittedly at times this moral landscapeto my exasperated ear emitsarchaic burrings, like a small, high-fencedelectricity sub-station of uncertain agein a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides.

But leave it now, leave it; as you lefta washed-out day at Stourport or the Lickey,improvised rainhats mulch for papier-mache,and the chips floating.Leave it now, leave it; give it overto that all-gathering general English light, in which each separate beadof drizzle at its own thorn-tip standsas revelation.'

Sunday, 19 April 2009

It's good to know that the fame and popularity of Laurel and Hardy endure, when most of the comic acts of their time (and, indeed, later) are now forgotten. Stan and Ollie were the perfect double act, masters of technique, but with a quite extraordinary rapport and a quality of innocent good humour that lifted them to the level of the comedy immortals. The last 'innocent' double act in the Laurel and Hardy sense - to the point of sharing a bed and no eyebrows raised - were Morecambe and Wise. Today's comedy double acts are very different beasts, with no trace of the music hall or silent film tradition behind them - and certainly no innocence (though David Mitchell of Mitchell and Webb can feign it, up to a point). The nearest thing we now have to innocent comedy that is also funny is, I suppose, Harry Hill - no double act he, but very much a one-off. And the great survivor Ken Dodd of course, who, fittingly, has written the tribute for the Laurel and Hardy unveiling.Meanwhile, as further proof of the immortality of Laurel and Hardy, just look at the frequent use in recent newspaper headlines of the phrase 'Another fine mess'. Oh yes, some very fine messes they've got us into lately...

Some sun in the garden today (thank G--)- and I've just seen my first Holly Blue of the year, basking on a leaf of a shrub I can't name. Mine was a female, with a black border to the upperwings, but I prefer this picture.

Friday, 17 April 2009

I don't like the sound of this (actually, come to think, what will it sound like? Can't be as good as the authentic cork pop). The demise of the cork is saddening. I don't mind screwcaps, and they're certainly convenient - but pulling a cork, when it goes well, is very satisfying, and the smell of the pulled cork is great (and gives you a pretty good idea of what the wine's like). The plastic 'cork' is, of course, an abomination - incredibly difficult to pull (or to remove from the corkscrew afterwards), impossible to put back in the bottle, no smell, no redeeming features. We should stick to corks anyway, to save the cork forests, a unique habitat that will otherwise disappear, along with its unique fauna. Think Lynx When You Drinks!

A brilliant piece of reportage - and much more - here. I think the transformation of our town centres into booze-and-violence arenas is one of the most important, dramatic - and deeply undesirable - social changes since the war (talking of which, if those who fought it could have seen what their country would be like in a few decades, I fancy they might not have bothered). And it was, as large social changes go, remarkably sudden. I can date it precisely because it happened in the interval between Mrs Nige and I having our children (a mere two, less than three years apart) and therefore for a while largely ceasing to 'go out', as commonly understood, and our returning to old haunts where once we'd enjoyed civilised drinking and eating. The appearance of the Junior Niges took place at the turn of the 80s; by the mid-80s the old haunts were changing fast - but by the end of the decade they were unrecoginsable; they were enemy territory, where anyone not there for the youthful boozing-and-fighting was as out of place as a pork sausage in a synagogue. The menace was palpable, whereas less than a decade ago these were parts of town where anyone could go, even on a Saturday night.At the same time, I was getting around the country quite a lot and often found myself in country (and county) towns, places which I remembered as tranquil and sedate to the point of tedium - but no, they too were suddenly heaving with drunken youth and seething with menace. The transformation seems to have occurred everywhere at pretty much the same time and pace. I have no idea why it should have happened then - or indeed at all (any ideas?) - but it is hard to think of another change to the face and feel of the country quite so dramatic and quite so unwelcome.

Another day, another gimmick - but what I want to know is this: Why does nobody seem to be developing steam cars, like this fine fellow? Surely they're the ultimate solution - run on water, make no noise and no emissions, and potentially capable of pretty impressive performance. In these retroprogressive times, the steam car should return to our roads in triumph...

Thursday, 16 April 2009

And more news from Scotland - Broon has managed to emit the word 'sorry', which is believed to be a lifetime first for him. But note how he's using it - he declares himself 'sorry about what happened'. Not 'sorry for' - and it was just something that 'happened' . All he is saying is that he regrets what happened, i.e. that McBride was found out. Well he would, wouldn't he? Ah but he takes 'full responsibility' - and in case we doubted that, he goes on, 'I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately.' But if you're taking 'full responsibility', Gordon, then 'the person who was responsible' was you, and you appear not to have gone immediately. It won't be long though, with any luck...

Good news from Scotland?! Can such things be? I wonder if the return to hymns might be happening all over the UK - it would, I think, be a healthy development. Secular music has to be of rather higher quality that Angels or Eva Cassidy's ritual slaughter of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, if it's to rise to the fact and the mystery of death. Even the secular classical canon mostly falls short. Speaking for myself, I already have my funeral music chosen. The mourners will shuffle in to Et Misericordia from Bach's Magnificat; at midpoint they'll be further undone by Bryn Terfel's rendition of Schubert's Litany for the Feast of All Souls; and at the end, those of them still capable of moving unaided will leave to the Cavatina from Beethoven's B Flat Quartet, while teams of cleaners move in to mop up the lake of tears. This is, of course, that paradoxical thing, the funeral I would have if I was alive to enjoy it. The funeral I have when I'm dead will be entirely up to the living I leave behind, and stipulating the music would be sheer self-indulgence. So yes, Wind Beneath My Wings will be fine by me...

Wednesday, 15 April 2009

Here's another 'initiative', this one unveiled yesterday by that irrepressible little scallywag Weeble Blears. It all sounds very dreary and pointless. What our high streets really need are more estate agents - there just aren't enough of them these days. Not real estate agents of course, but pretend ones - they could be played by unemployed estate agents, it would be good therapy for them. These 'estate agents' could sit in their offices all day, wearing awful suits and ties, pretending to be doing important things on the phone, while their windows fill up with lots of pretend houses for sale at inflated prices. At a stroke, walking down the high street would be just like the old days, and confidence - that crucial factor - would rise no end, making us feel that happy days are here again, all's well with the world and it's high time we started spending money, taking out massive loans and returning the country to the boom years... Of course there's just the off chance it might not work. Any other ideas?

Following the 'news' is always a baffling affair - so much of it seems incomprehensible. It's easy enough to see that yesterday's 'initiative' on 'drink dependent' (define) benefits claimants was wheeled out to deflect attention from Damiangate, and is the usual unworkable, change-nothing one-day headline-grabber. What was mystifying was that, on the BBC TV news, a view on the measure was sought from, and freely given by, a woman representing OXFAM. Have I missed something? Does famine stalk the land? Will action on drunks' benefits ease world hunger? Or is it that Oxfam is just another political pressure group, with a view on everything? They'll be getting no more donations from me, that's for sure. Meanwhile, here's a real - and really rather funny - puzzler. I suppose it's good to know that a people who, while sitting on vast piles of wholly unearned wealth, have contributed nothing to the world but international terrorism and an ultra-repressive version of Islam can be so easily duped. Maybe the CIA should be looking into this... Oh I forgot - they're our friends. Of course.

Tuesday, 14 April 2009

I've deliberately avoided saying anything about the unspeakably sordid McBride email business (go Guido! go Iain!) - but I must admit that I was shocked to discover just now that the ghastly man is a mere 34 years of age! Thirty-four?! It seems barely believable that a man could look that comprehensively bad (I'll spare you the pictures) at such a young age. Is that what life in the Brown bunker does to a person? He certainly ended up with the face he deserved in double quick time.

At last, London has some plausibly vernal weather - I sniffed my first lilac of the year this morning - but spring is a notoriously delusive season. Here's one canny observer writing in 1898: 'There is twilight and soft clouds and daffodils - and a great weariness. Spring! Excellentissime - Spring? We are annually lured by false hopes. Spring! Che coglioneria! Another illusion for the undoing of mankind.' I'll reveal who that is in due course (and you'll be surprised), but feel free to post your guesses - let's call it a Spring Competition. Meanwhile, more surreal developments at Victoria station, which already has the poster proclaiming 'Chichester, The New Copenhagen'. Where once stood the best bagel stall on the station there has risen a self-proclaimed 'Temple of Porcine Perfection' - in fact, a stall selling 'artisan sausages [prefer pork myself] in buns'. I doubt it will last much longer than the short-lived 'Danish Sausage Experience' of evil memory - but somehow some sausagey essence seems to have woven its way into the DNA of Victoria station. I wonder why...

Monday, 13 April 2009

Well, today is Samuel Beckett's birthday - he liked to claim that it was Good Friday the 13th, but that happy coincidence didn't occur in 1906, his natal year. It is also - despite all evidence to the contrary here in grey cold drizzly London - Spring, a season which always brings to mind the 'brief statement' (26 unparagraphed pages) made by the gentleman in the green baize apron in Watt, before he leaves Mr Knott's house, the gentleman who of course regrets 'everything' and who takes a dim view of the natural world and the turning seasons - "The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."The gentleman may regard the whole business as 'an excrement', 'a turd' - but isn't this an extraordinarily vivid and evocative piece of nature writing? In fact, Beckett often demonstrates a remarkably sharp eye (and ear) for landscape and close-up detail, for the sights and sounds of nature - the bleak landscapes of Molloy, for example (clearly rooted, as is the passage above, in the author's memories of Ireland), are brilliantly realised and linger long in the mind. Perhaps Beckett's attention to nature is all the sharper for his sense of man's inescapable alienation from it - it is a scene across which a man passes but of which he can never fully be (or feel himself) a part. There's another lovely passage earlier in the gentleman's monologue - "The long blue days for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exahusted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day into hiding..."It seems to me that among Beckett's less celebrated talents is that of a brilliant, if eccentric, reluctant and against-the-grain, nature writer.

Sunday, 12 April 2009

'When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. Very early when the sun had risen, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb. They were saying to one another, "Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back; it was very large. On entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe, and they were utterly amazed. He said to them, "Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.'" Then they went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.'

Saturday, 11 April 2009

John Nash, brother of the more famous Paul, was born on this day in 1893. His elder brother might have been right to advise him to avoid art school, but it left him with a slightly shaky technique - as a painter; his prints, where his strong sense of design comes into its own, are often more successful. However, John Nash did paint some fine works, which, like his brother's, are firmly in the English romantic pastoral tradition and yet with a jagged modernist edge. Both men's art was shaped by the Great War - they were both war artists, and John was one of only 12 survivors of an 80-man crossing of No Man's Land, near Cambrai - the subject of his most famous painting. The picture above is The Cornfield, the first he completed after his war pictures. There's a rather good poem about it here.

Friday, 10 April 2009

Last night, while it was still Maundy Thursday, I was musing on the fine ceremony of the Maundy Money, and wondered when the earlier tradition of the monarch actually washing the feet of representatives of the deserving poor was abandoned. To my surprise, I discovered that it lasted until the death of James II. There is even a drawing from life of Elizabeth I performing this symbolic, but very physical and intimate, service. I would not propose that our monarchs - especially our poor old Queen - should again take to washing the feet of the poor, but would it not be a wonderful and salutary thing to see those who now have real power over the people - Gordon Broon and, say, 'Jacqui' Smith and 'Lord' Mandelson - thus on their knees? Ah well, a man can dream... Meanwhile, in the garden, the first snakeshead fritillary is in flower today (hence the picture). Always a sight to gladden the heart.

Thursday, 9 April 2009

Here's axe murderer turned jailhouse lawyer John Hirst explaining the rationale behind his campaign (now apparently successful, thanks to the lunacy of the European Court of Human Rights) to secure the vote for prisoners: 'Killing my landlady was an abuse of power. By the same token, the state is abusing power in relation to the prisoner votes case and refusing to rectify the situation.' So, in other words, nipping outside, spotting an axe, then nipping back in and killing a defenceless woman with it is pretty much on a par with legislating to withhold the vote from prisoners. Got that? This is surely the most jaw-dropping use of the weasel phrase 'by the same token' on record.

The mighty US navy is facing a threat on the high seas that it hasn't faced since the Barbary Wars - back to the future again. Clowns descend on the poor earthquake survivors of Abruzzo (while Berlusconi assures them they're having a fun camping trip). As if they haven't suffered enough... And this guy does the decent thing - which prompts the question (question?!), if that had been 'Jacqui' Smith, would she have fallen on her sword the following morning? No, that's not a question really, is it?

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

It's Baudelaire's birthday today - happy 188th, Charlot! It's a long time since I read him, and I must admit I feel little inclination to return to his work. Is it just me, or is there something faintly absurd about all that self-conscious, overwrought 'decadence'? Yet he was certainly, as T.S. Eliot noted, a fine craftsman... I don't know, I think in the end - like so much of literary taste - it's a matter of mood. Baudelaire suited the mood of my younger self, always eager for a morbid thrill - dammit, I even read Maldoror - but that was then... Still, any excuse for a Nadar photograph. Even more remarkable is the one of Gerard de Nerval.

The latest bad news about butterflies is sad but hardly unexpected to anyone who's lived through the last couple of sodden British summers. What's refreshing is that, amazingly, this BBC News story contains no reference (unless I missed something) to 'climate change'. Even the most determined warmist must acknowledge that the plight of our butterflies (or most of them) is down to the dear old British weather and its reluctance to settle down into a predictable seasonal pattern. The good thing is that past experience shows that it only takes one seriously sunny summer to make a huge difference - for the good - to the overall butterfly population. So let us devoutly hope that this year we get one.

Stanley Elkin seems to be one of those American writers who never quite registered on the radar on this side of the Atlantic. I remember dipping into him back in the 70s or 80s, but what I found I only very sketchily recall - I think I was perhaps too young for him, as when I first read Bellow. Recently, though, some mention of him on, I think, this blog or this blog - or very possibly both - piqued my interest again and I determined to have another look at Elkin. By way of the indispensable AbeBooks, I tracked down The Dick Gibson Show, in a paperback edition from the 80s, and began to read. I was hooked from the first paragraph, and read on in something like amazement. Elkin is, among other things, an absolute master of the spiel - once he gets going, he has you, there's no resisting, he sweeps you along on his torrent of words. Rather than a man writing a novel, he sounds and feels like a man talking to you, urgently, hilariously, endlessly inventively, twisting and turning the language, keeping it alive, always keeping you with him - but never in the oppressive way of a man standing on your toes and talking into your face; he is far too subtle and witty for that. The Dick Gibson Show is ostensibly the story of a radio man - a DJ travelling from station to station across America and through the decades from the Depression years to the 60s, the perpetual outsider, adpating himself to circumstances and to whatever events seek him out, then moving on. The novel is a world made of voices - Dick's own proetan pan-American voice, and those of the people he encounters, in the flesh and over the airwaves. Most of the tale is told in the form of transcripts of radio programmes and of Dick's other spiels. Along the way, Elkin creates a rich cast of comic (and sometimes desperately sad) characters, many of whom make one brief appearance and then are gone, but a few of whom recur towards the end. His profligacy - with language as well as characters - his generosity and energy and inventiveness are quite astonishing. Of course The Dick Gibson Show is loosely structured - as with Bellow, the structure is hardly the point - but it is anchored by certain set pieces, notably the extraordinary talk show in which each guest in turn, under the malign influence of a visiting 'psychiatrist', gives an intimate account of a shameful, lust-fuelled incident in their life, then falls unstirrably silent. There's also an unexpected change of scene, representing Dick Gibson's war years in Mauritius (of all places), where a fantastical tale involving dodos and the Japanese army unfolds. Yes, it is unpreditable too, wholly - and unlike anything else I've read - and very funny, laugh aloud funny, and lewd and bursting with life. I'm very glad to have made Elkin's acquaintance again,and I'll definitely be reading more - when I've got my breath back from The Dick Gibson Show.

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

When I heard the story of the 'Crusoe dog', it rang a bell... Of course - The Dog Crusoe by R.M. Balantyne was one of the strange miscellany of bygone books on the shelves of my childhood home. I never read it (despite having greatly enjoyed The Coral Island) and now rather wish I had - the marvellous chapter headings suggest just the kind of adventure I might have relished as a boy. Oddly, no desert islands seem to be involved in the tale though...

Monday, 6 April 2009

So, it seems we Brits can't cope with a fish called pollack. We'll be much happier, these marketing genii believe, with a fish called Colin. It seems they have the French language in mind - where colin actually means hake - but the English eye will read the word as Colin, as in Colin Cowdrey. The smart thing would surely have been to name the fish Graeme, as in Graeme Pollock. Sorted.

Sunday, 5 April 2009

Three big-time Hollywood stars were all born on this day (albeit in different years) - Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy and Gregory Peck. Imagine that formidable troika of egos throwing a joint birthday party...

They say that as you grow older you talk to yourself more (returning perhaps, as is the way of things, to a habit of childhood). I certainly talk to myself more now than I did even ten years ago. Partly, no doubt, it's because, with the hurly burly phase of family life over, I'm more likely to be on my own at home - and my various occupations are generally solitary. And there's the cat, with whom I'm liable to conduct rather elegantly phrased one-sided conversations which are merely a variation on talking to myself. Of course it's as well to be sure you are on your own (except for the odd cat, or dog) when talking to yourself - though these days, if you're caught doing it in public, all you have to do is tilt your head to one side, look serious and pretend you're on a fancy mobile... I think there's more to talking to yourself than mere habit though. There's a fine line between thinking and verbalising, and I find that talking to myself undoubtedly helps to clarify my thoughts, such as they are, to shape whatever I might be composing in my head, and to nail down things that would otherwise remain nebulous, not quite thought because not stated. It's effective too - more effective than unverbalised mental effort - in spurring myself to action or concentration or renewed effort, and in improving the chances of something that needs to be remembered (if it's only the reason for having got up and walked across the room) being remembered. In a way, it's amazing how little mental activity we do verbalise. We read silently - an ability which struck St Augustine as prodigious when he observed St Ambrose doing it - we watch our various screens silently, we listen to music silently, we even commune silently (especially if we're men) with those we're close enough to. Surely it is no bad thing - is probably beneficial to the mind - to break the silence and give some temporary, partial form to that unvoiced mental world by talking to oneself. And one thing we can be sure of when we do it - we'll have an appreciative audience. Certainly more appreciative than the cat.

I promise I shan't link to any more YouTube clips this weekend, but a friend sent me this one, and it's so astounding I felt I had to pass it on (with apologies if you've seen it already - it seems to have had an awful lot of hits). Here it is - Enjoy!

Friday, 3 April 2009

A jar of Mellow Birds instant 'coffee' has mysteriously appeared in the office. Did it appear through a portal in time, or are they actually still making the stuff? Maybe it's a retro revival thing... As I remember it, this was the instant coffee for people who didn't like coffee one bit. Its selling point was essentially that it tasted of nothing, or at least nothing that would suggest coffee to the most imaginative palate. Maybe I'm wrong - I'm certainly not going to try it. Instant coffee (even in less 'mellow' form) has no place in Nigeworld.

It's George Herbert's birthday (born 1593). Here is his own church, which does indeed retain something of a Herbert atmsophere, despite much restoration. Follow the links to George Herbert and on to the Poems, which finish with the wonderful Prayer. 'The land of spices, something understood'...

Thursday, 2 April 2009

Baroque is definitely the style of the moment, what with the blockbuster exhibition at the V&A and the Handel tercentenary all over Radio 3 - I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the headline 'Baroque 'n' Roll' over some baroque-themed gush. Well, baroque is good. It's an endlessly fascinating and far-ranging style, and, unlike Renaissance, we Brits made a pretty good fist of it - in architecture and related crafts big-time, in painting and music more than enough (thanks to some shrewd imports). For far too long, the baleful influence of John Ruskin led to widespread suspicion of the Baroque; it's good to have it back where it belongs (though it's unlikely it will ever have the crowd-pulling appeal of, say, French Impressionism). I wonder if, in due course, there will be a re-evaluation of the late flowering known as Edwardian Baroque, the defining style of the triumphant British Empire, and the dominant style of many of the grander public buildings in London and other cities. We seem strangely blind to its charms just now, and it's easy to feel intimidated by it; Edwardian Baroque can be a heavy, forbidding, altogether excessive style, especially when over-Frenchified. However, in its peculiarly English 'Wrenaissance' form, as practised by the great Lutyens, it can be graceful, elegant and beautiful. That's his Country Life offices above, with the Midland Bank, Piccadilly, below (if my uploading went right). Such buildings tend to be ignored or simply not noticed, while from the heavier manifestations of Edwardian Baroque we shrink away. It's a shame - we're missing, or taking for granted, some very fine, and very abundant, architecture. Edwardian Baroque might even be in the same kind of neglected, looked-down-on place Victorian Gothic was a few decades ago. Surely its time will come (and that of Edwardian architecture in general, which seems to me to be seriously underrated, but that's, maybe, for another post...)

A curious - nay, downright misleading - headline on a dubious story, which reeks of wine industry self-serving. In my experience - supplemented by ample evidence of the best kind, i.e. anecdotal - women who buy red wine tend towards musclebound Australian shiraz of barely drinkable pungency (I've even known one or two who were addicted to 'sparkling Shiraz' - sorry, but there it is...). The women I know who favour white wine tend to have more taste and discernment - though, like most of the population, they too have a tendency toward buying Australian rather than, as any sane person would, French. As the great Bryan Appleyard has remarked, after forgetting his own rule and suffering the consequences, Only Drink French Wine* (argh, my head hurts). And, as the great Al Murray, pub Landlord, ordains: 'White wine for the lady.'

At last, some good news from Afghanistan. Not only has Johnny Afghan taken to playing cricket; his national team has beaten the mighty Danes and could be on its way to the World Cup finals. A naysayer might point out that it's more an overspill Pakistani team really, and that the present condition of Pakistan demonstrates that cricket is no guarantor of a civlised polity, but me I take the view that the more of the world plays cricket, the better the world will be, if only by a streaky edge past fine leg.

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

As the boys in blue await the invasion of London by an army of protesters exercised by the G20 summit, it's rather alarming to hear that the Met have codenamed their security operation Glencoe - a name with rather unfortunate connotations, especially for our Caledonian cousins. How do they come up with these codenames anyway? Do they have a Codenames Origination Department? I wouldn't be at all surprised. If so, this one should have been sent back. Why not something nice like Glenlivet?

This man, the Irish Taioseach Brian Cowan - as seen recently, naked and at stool, in an unofficial portrait hung fleetingly in Dublin - is, believe it or not, the second highest paid national leader in the world, after the US President. Cowan's salary comes in at an eye-watering 257,000 Euros. The untarnished history of the honourable office of Taioseach proves what the advocates of more pay for MPs maintain - that a high salary is a bastion against corruption (hem hem). As does the famously punctilious behaviour of our highly paid MEPs (triple hem).

Idly noting that it's the birthday of Edgar Wallace today, I looked him up on Wikipedia. I did not expect to find this - surely one of the most colourful (not to mention profitable and prolific) literary lives of the 20th century. I read on to the end with mounting astonishment - and can only suggest you do the same. Wallace's life and career make even the great Jeff's seem like pallid stuff - though Wallace did at least stay out of jail (thanks in large part to the extraordinary indulgence of Lord Rothermere). What's really surprising is that there doesn't seem to be, as far as I can make out, a modern biography of Edgar Wallace. The story is a gift - someone should pick it up.

About Me

Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene.